Apparatus to track eye movement is well known. Such apparatus is available from, for example, ISCAN, Inc. of Burlington, Mass. and Tobii Technology AB of Stockholm, Sweden.
It is known to track eye movement in response to various types of visual stimuli, such as still images, slide shows, movies and the like.
It is also known to use any of a variety of available eye movement monitoring apparatus types, such as stationary eye tracking, head-mounted eye tracking, combined head and eye movement tracking, and so on.
Eye movement tracking has been put to advantageous use in the field of advertising. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,075,657 discloses a system for providing a visual indicator of where the viewer is looking and superimposing that indicator on the image then being displayed to the viewer. This enables an analysis of the effectiveness of a commercial by determining whether the viewer's attention is sufficiently attracted to those portions of the commercial which are considered to be of greatest value in selling the advertised product. The content of U.S. Pat. No. 4,075,657 is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Such an analysis technique is convenient and effective in providing valuable and meaningful results. However, one shortcoming is that it has limitations in determining whether the viewer is bored, highly stimulated, or anything in between while looking at any part of the image. Where along this scale the viewer's level of interest falls is of great interest to an advertiser for the reason that a viewer is more likely to remember a product when the level of interest is high than when it is low.
Up to the present time, determinations of the impact an advertisement makes on consumers have been primarily reliant on telephone surveys. Questions are posed regarding a commercial, for example, but the accuracy and reliability of the responses are inherently suspect because they are subjective and rely on memory of events that happened perhaps some days before.
Consequently, a better indicator which actually measures viewer interest objectively and in real time would be highly valuable to have. However, despite the need for an effective and convenient measurement, and despite the availability of eye movement tracking apparatus and its application to the field of advertising in order to determine where the viewer is looking at any given time, as explained above, up to the present time the usefulness of eye movement tracking in revealing the level of viewer interest in what is being viewed has been of limited value.
It is also well known that visual images, such as in commercials can be made more appealing or less appealing by such factors as pacing, length and accompanying audio. The pacing used, for example, to cut from one scene to another (i.e. it is difficult, and even annoying, to follow if pacing is too fast), the duration of each scene (i.e. viewers can lose interest if it “drags on”), and the copy being read or background music being played (i.e. can enhance the impact of the image or steal attention away from it), can affect the level of viewer interest in terms of the degree of engagement the viewer has with the commercial. Therefore, the input the commercial makes on the viewer in terms of, for example, impression (favorable or unfavorable) and retention (remember or not remember the product). An advertiser seeking to maximize the impact wants to create a high level of viewer interest by suitably adjusting the content of the visual image itself as well as the accompanying elements of the commercial. However, as these factors are “tweaked”, some objective and accurate measurement of the results for each set of factors is needed.